


that's all there is to this story

by Yuisaki



Series: when spring comes to me too [2]
Category: Given (Anime), Given (Manga)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Established Relationship, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-13
Updated: 2019-09-13
Packaged: 2020-10-17 00:36:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20612021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yuisaki/pseuds/Yuisaki
Summary: “Mafuyu, why’d you carry your guitar around if you didn’t know how to play it?"





	that's all there is to this story

In the cooling echoes of their practice session, Haruki is the one who breaks the silence. 

“Mafuyu, why’d you carry your guitar around if you didn’t know how to play it?”

Uenoyama jerks. Water splashes across the floor from his open bottle. Even Akihiko in the corner, tapping away with his drumsticks, falters in his rhythm before he picks it back up without a trace. Professionalism. Mafuyu envies that sometimes. 

“Well,” Mafuyu says after a moment. “I don’t know. I guess I liked the weight of it.”

“Nobody likes the weight of a guitar,” Haruki says, laughing, and Mafuyu smiles. Uenoyama gives him a lingering glance, then nudges his leg with a foot. _You okay?_

Isn’t that always the question. In response, Mafuyu strums a quick chord. His fingers are off by a half-centimeter. An ugly twang rings out in the studio.

“Sounds like you have to tune it again,” Haruki says.

“No,” Mafuyu tells him. “That was all me.”

***

Why did he carry around the guitar?

Well, a few reasons. The black cover is thick like a blanket so it was perfect for the winter when Mafuyu forgot a scarf or a coat all too often. Inside the cover Yuki had left rusted strings, crumpled sheet music, a pen, a blue capo, and a pack of tissues. Mafuyu never carried them because he always had Yuki do it for him. The days he forgot, delirious with cold, he could think about Yuki and how much he didn’t miss him, and unzip and zip and unzip the guitar cover to find that pack of tissues, like finding Yuki in the places he least expected, like seeing Yuki’s ghost in a punch to the gut, like hearing Yuki chiding, _I can’t believe you forgot tissues again. You catch colds more easily than a kindergartner. What would you do without me?_

Nothing, Yuki; that’s what Mafuyu would do for the entire season, and the next, and the next. 

Wood makes up the body of a guitar. If it’s good wood, it won’t even crack when hurled at the wall—granted that the cover is still on, of course. Mafuyu wanted to smash that guitar especially after he went to the beach and heard the wind biting at his ears and looked down to find only one set of footprints left in the sand. Some days, he really, really wanted to destroy that guitar. But the wood is sturdy. It doesn’t collapse so easily. 

In a rumpled bed, with the cover still on, the curves of a guitar are not unlike those of a human body. There are dips in the center that Mafuyu used to pull the guitar close and pretend that it was Yuki and his beating heart and his short nails and his lean waist, and everything that he wasn’t at the end. The guitar works just as well in sunlit stairways. It stands upright when Mafuyu locks his knees around the slopes in the body and curls his arms around the neck and drops his face into his arms. Black covers absorb heat. Some days it’s even warm. 

Not to mention Yuki’s mom gave him the guitar after the funeral. Her hands were soft, unlike her son’s. “He would’ve wanted you to have it,” she said. 

How stupid. Yuki was gone. Obviously he didn’t want Mafuyu to have anything anymore. 

Fifteen years around the Yoshida household clued him into a few things about Yuki’s mother—namely that when her husband left, she cried and broke a plate and then called him a lying son of a bitch. She told him to forget it once she realized that Mafuyu was standing at the doorway, but he never did. After the funeral, her eyes were red-rimmed. She loved Mafuyu like a son since he hung around for fifteen years. Maybe he could believe that she didn’t say anything under her breath at the funeral or break any plates, if it wasn’t for the fact that _like a son_ is not the same as a son and when a son dies, _like a son_ just becomes dead weight and shackles, and when she said, “He would’ve wanted you to have it,” Mafuyu understood she was really trying to say, “He would’ve wanted you to remember—it’s the least you can do, isn’t it?”

Yuki’s mom lived twenty minutes from his apartment. Sometimes the thought of running into her in the street without it and hearing her say, “He only meant that much to you?” scared him so bad he couldn’t breathe with the iron strings choking his lungs. He carried the guitar around. 

A red Gibson ES-330, whatever that meant. Yuki raved about it for ages once he saved up enough after two years to buy it himself. “It’s like, the ribeye of meat, you know?” Yuki said, and Mafuyu just hummed; he didn’t know cuts of beef, either. This red Gibson ES-330 was lying at Yuki’s feet the day Mafuyu found him dead on the floor. It made him remember what Yuki looked like, alive and straight-backed and then dead, and it made him remember that Mafuyu couldn’t be lonely—that was for people who deserved it, not for Mafuyu who couldn’t cry, still so furious that he couldn’t visit Yuki’s headstone for an entire year.

_Can you die for me, then?_

The weight of a Gibson is twelve pounds. Twelve pounds is eerily similar to the weight of Yuki slinging his arm across Mafuyu’s shoulders, laughing in his ear, making his knees buckle at the weight for just a second before Yuki eased up with a poke to his cheek. _Maybe if you learned how to play, you could learn how to stand up under the weight. I’m not even putting all my weight on you, so like this, I’m not any heavier than a guitar, you know._

_Do you want to teach me, then?_

_No, I want you to sing._

Maybe Mafuyu could do both. Have you ever thought about that, Yuki?

***

“You can ask, you know,” Mafuyu says to Uenoyama later that night, tracing the dips in his ribcage, lingering on his fast-beating heart. 

Uenoyama raises his head from the pillow to stare at him. “Ask about what?”

“Ask about why I carried the guitar around. I know you’re curious.”

“Is this a trap?” Uenoyama asks with no small amount of suspicion, and Mafuyu laughs. “No, seriously. I mean, it’s like—it’s kind of. You don’t really like to talk about it, right?”

“No,” Mafuyu says. “But you fixed the strings, so I think you get to know, even if Haruki-san doesn’t.”

“What does fixing the strings have to do with telling me about the guitar?”

“Because I thought strings couldn’t be fixed,” Mafuyu says, “and that what I did to Yuki couldn’t ever be forgiven. If Yuki was somewhere watching me, he would’ve wanted me to keep it around forever so that I couldn’t play it even if I wanted to. It would’ve become dead weight, just something to make me remember where that guitar was when he died. I thought he was telling me to carry around this useless guitar not for me or anyone else, but for him. He wanted to be remembered. He said that all the time.”

When Uenoyama doesn’t respond, Mafuyu lifts his head to find Uenoyama’s face hidden behind his arm. The grip on Mafuyu’s shoulder tightens, just a bit, and Mafuyu smiles. He reaches up to poke the callouses on Uenoyama’s fingers. “What are you thinking?”

“I don’t know,” Uenoyama says, muffled. “I—jealousy, maybe? But that’s stupid. Talk. Finish your story. I’m fine.”

“Maybe I’m not fine with you being ‘not fine.’”

“You are the most infuriating, you know that?”

Mafuyu presses a kiss to Uenoyama’s fingers. “Really?”

In a few moments, pink crawls Uenoyama’s cheeks down to his neck. When Mafuyu brushes his thumb against Uenoyama’s ear, he’s surprised to find that even that’s warm to the touch. Uenoyama swats him away. “Stop that.”

“It’s my way of saying thank you. You don’t like it?”

“Thank me for what?”

“For fixing the strings,” Mafuyu tells him. He settles his head under Uenoyama’s chin, grabbing Uenoyama’s hand to fiddle with the long and thin fingers—a pianist’s fingers goes the phrase, but personally Mafuyu’s always thought a guitarist’s fingers were better. Tougher, stronger. “In the end I think I carried the guitar around so that someday, it could be fixed.”

“That’s all?”

That’s all, he says, like it can be tied up so neatly. The thing is that guitars with broken strings can be fixed again and again, and the body of the guitar is made up of wood so sturdy it won’t crack hurled against the wall, and they’re heavy enough to teach you how to withstand its weight after hours in the studio, and it can be leaned on in a sunlit stairway where a boy can snip away the strings and the grief so that they linger, but they won’t destroy the sound anymore. 

Yuki thought guitars sounded better the more they’re played. With Uenoyama, Mafuyu is beginning to believe it. 

“Sometimes, Uenoyama-kun, you can be a little dense,” Mafuyu says, and laughing, he thinks, _I love you; I do, I do. Thank you._

**Author's Note:**

> i swear "a winter story" is a song just to kick my inspiration into gear. two finished stories in a week? wildin!
> 
> come talk to me about given over at yuisakii on tumblr!


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